I was trying to explain to a customer this week, the fundamentals of web design using HTML5 & CSS3 Style Sheets and the advantages that it offers when compared to in-line styling, – In-line styling is when we include all the styling information within our HTML document, and I felt this was a good point to try and get across to my regular readers.
In today’s SEO sensitive world, where rank and position dictates so much of a web designer‘s task list, CSS styling is the only way to go if we want to secure a good rank.
The main principal is as follows: When all other factors are equal, search engines will return the fastest loading page first.
So how does this tie in with style sheets or effect the way designers create web pages for their clients?
The use of CSS or Cascading Style Sheets allows use to remove huge amounts of code from the HTML document it’s self. Rather than all the information being loaded in one go (and so slowing the page load time of the HTML document in question) the styling information is replaced by one line of code. This is essentially an instruction that tells the browser; for details of how to display the elements contained in our_page.html, go fetch our_page_style_info.css.
The file names are not important, what is important is that you web browser understands that there is a linked document that relates to this page and it should apply the styling information from that document to the page it’s just loaded.
By Doing this we can reduce something called code bloat – in some cases reducing the overall size of the HTML Document to a fraction of what it would have been.
Now remember – smaller files, load faster.
When the search bots crawl the page, the load time is substantially reduced and thus the page is assigned a higher rank when compared to what it would have been had all the code bloat been left in place.
At Arena we use search engine friendly coding techniques to create website that load fast and deliver superb SEO performance. It’s all part of what we call Total Website Optimisation.
Intelligent Website Design
Intelligent Design can make make the difference between a site performing well or performing poorly and can greatly influence the overall effectiveness and conversion rate of your website. At Arena DM we apply this common sense strategic approach to every website that we build. If you think your company could benefit from this type of expertise we’d love to hear from you so why not reach out to us using the form at the bottom of this page.
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